Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall) (24 page)

At
the topmost level, the floors of all three wings were largely deserted. Corner
rooms overlooking the Castle’s surroundings were manned by snipers, one per
corner, allowing two guns to be brought to bear on any side of the complex.
Each day one of the kitchen staff would climb the stairs to the top, carrying
an old red plastic shopping basket with meals for the stationed snipers.

Today
was Marcia’s day to make the climb, and the old woman moved with patient care,
wary of her footing on the cement stairs. She had to descend after climbing to
the top in each wing since they had been designed with defense in mind, and
only connected at the ground floor. This was the third and final wing, and she
stopped to catch her breath on the landing, rubbing the small of her back. With
a murmured curse, she started off once more, wending her way to the sniper’s
room at the wing’s far end. The halls were empty, the floors drifted with dust
marked by the footfalls of the few who ventured here. The air was flat and
stale. The building’s windows couldn’t be opened, and what little ventilation
there was came from the sniper rooms, where the tough glass had been hammered
out.

A
scrawny teenager with a spotty blonde beard turned from the window as Marcia
entered. He cradled a hunting rifle across his chest, which he leaned against
the wall as he took his meal: Stew in a plastic container, a hunk of coarse
bread the size of his fist and a slab of salty smoked beef nearly as large.
Despite the warm June air outside, the room still felt cold. It occupied a
northern corner, and the concrete of the walls held the night’s chill through
the day.

The
sniper muttered a thank you and sat to eat. Marcia gathered up the dishes from
his previous meal and put them in the basket before leaving.

She
worked her way back toward the stairwell, but turned aside before reaching it,
quietly opening a door and stepping within. She turned the latch, locking it, and
moved deeper into an old suite of offices, past cubicles where keyboards
gathered dust and screens stared with fishy plastic eyes going white with age.
She opened another door, this one of heavy wood, and entered an office with an
expansive desk and a wall of windows that looked out over the dunes and
bunchgrass to the north. She watched cloud shadows chase each other across the
landscape for a moment; blue smears cupping each hill or hollow faithfully as
they fled east.

The
desk bore a pile of wool yarn and a half-finished sweater of raw yellow-white.
There were a pair of ragged, dog-eared romance novels scavenged from the
sub-basement wreckage, a tin holding some lumps of sugar filched from the
kitchens, a candle in a tin can and a small bottle of purple liqueur,
half-empty.

The
old woman turned away from the window, locking the door to the office, and sat
down at the desk. The leather of the chair wheezed dustily in complaint. She
pushed the knitting aside, then opened the largest of the desk’s drawers. She
grunted as she bent and retrieved a heavy, square case from the drawer, setting
it on the floor by her feet. She released the metal latches holding its cover
in place and removed the headset and key, setting them on the desktop. She bent
again and retrieved a notepad and pencil.

The
lengthening cloud shadows chased each other faster as the sun set, hurrying to
greet the rising dark, while Marcia wrote.

Rastowich,
dressed in the dark olive of his dress uniform, stood with Mayor Williams as
Moorhouse and Kovacs were hanged. The battalion’s executioner, a meek
bespectacled man named James Wood, moved with practiced economy, hooding the
pair, then settling the noose around each man’s neck, the knot just below their
left ear.

The
two stood, hands tied behind them, on a scaffold erected inside the
university’s stadium. The football field had been covered in plastic turf and
remained an eerie bright green despite the years of sun and rain. The scaffold
looked ungainly and dire on the emerald background. It was built of scavenged
lumber, black with age.

Townsfolk
filled a handful of the thousands of seats and children romped up and down the
steps, dodged down rows of bleachers and called in shrill voices. Most of the
adults, Williams included, were smiling. The Colonel was not, and ignored the
traditional reading of charges by the lieutenant in charge of the execution,
studying instead the scrap of paper he held.

Speed
essential. Area now locked, status of goods not known. Unknown if C in
possession or knowledge of goods. Third party actions against C accelerating
schedule. Third party unknown.

Rastowich
folded the paper neatly into his jacket pocket as the traps of the scaffold
thumped open. The former Castle commander and his underling jerked to a stop on
their respective ropes. The bodies kicked and spasmed briefly, but soon hung
limp, twisting lazily. Urine began to dribble from the dangling legs as the
bladders drained.

Williams
was extending a hand and saying something congratulatory. Rastowich shook it
twice and dropped it, looking over the Mayor’s shoulder and speaking across his
thanks.

“Captain?”

“Yes
sir?”

“Second
and fourth company to ride, tomorrow at dawn. We’re going on ahead, the rest to
follow ASAP.”

“Yes
sir.”

Three
and a half years to get here
, reflected Rastowich as
he pushed past a still-talking Williams.
Three and a half years, and now
I’ve got no time.

“One
more thing, Captain. Meet me in my tent after mess. I need to fill you in on
something.”

The
camp buzzed. Troopers readied their gear to depart while others packed to move
into garrisoning positions within Pullman itself. Troops to travel with the
Colonel were lining up by squad at the supply wagons and being issued
additional magazines for their rifles. The noise was constant and made worse by
the hissing thump of one of the engineering steam tractors that had arrived yesterday.
The rivet-sweating metal beast was twice the size of a bus, with a set of
rail-gauge wheels tucked under its belly and a four segmented tracks that
could, with time and effort, be raised or lowered as needed. The engineers had
been repairing track in teams, and reported that supply trains were waiting on
one more shipment of rails to bridge the final gaps in the route. The shipment
was at least three days away, according to the telegraph. This one tractor had
ranged ahead, exhausting most of its tender of coal, to bring a crew and tools
to finalize the work on the old Pullman switchyard. Rastowich hoped the
predictions were accurate, as supplies were thin after their quick advance, but
it would have to take care of itself.

The
Captain presented himself precisely one-half hour after the bugle call for
mess, ducking into the Colonel’s tent just as Rastowich was pouring himself a
cup of tea. The Colonel poured a second one, setting the pot back on the ring
of a diminutive white-gas stove that hissed quietly on a folding camp table.

“Have
a seat, Captain. And some tea.”

“Thank
you, sir.”

Rastowich
sipped gingerly, watching the Captain over the lip of the tin mug. Captain
Nakamura was broad and square. Not tall, but taller than one expected due to
the width of his shoulders.

“How
many years is it, Captain?”

“Since
we started west? Three years and seven months, sir,” Nakamura took short sips
of his tea, balancing the cup on his knee between each.

“This
talk is informal, Captain, so relax,” Rastowich said. “I need to share some
information with you, in case anything happens to me before we can take the
Larson facility.”

Nakamura
tipped his head in a brief nod.

“So,
to start, the Larson facility is the main reason we’ve taken a northern line to
the Pacific,” the Colonel said. “We could have crossed through Texas and into
California, but the Puget Sound cities are seeing most of the trade out of
Asia, so that’s a factor as well. The San Juan Islands protected a fair bit of
their infrastructure from the same post-impact waves that tore San Francisco up
so badly.

“In
any case, good trading port or not, we’d have had to come north to retake
Larson. The Larson facility was built just a few years before the Fall on old
Air Force land near a town in Washington called Moses Lake. It was built for
Homeland Security as a western operations headquarters, not long after San
Diego was hit. How much of that is still taught at the Academy?”

“That
San Diego was the target of a terrorist nuclear device. It was the first
nuclear strike on the continental US and it precipitated a lot of political
changes,” Nakamura rattled off. His mouth curved in a brief smile. “I don’t
remember what the changes were, I have to admit.”

“Constitutional
changes, largely, but its moot now. When the Congress reconvenes it’s going to
have to start from scratch. Anyway: Larson. Larson was basically a secure block
of offices where intelligence was gathered. It was a paranoid time, and the
government wanted decentralized control to avoid any chance of a concentrated
attack taking out a large chunk of the chain of command. So they built a few
centers like the Larson facility.”

Nakamura
raised an eyebrow and poured a second cup of tea before speaking.

“What’s
hidden in there, Sir? Nukes?”

“No.
We still have nukes no one knows what to do with, getting older and dustier in
a hundred shielded silos. Ironic that the only technology well enough shielded
to survive the Fall was in deep silos and isn’t useful for anything, anymore.
Though some of the systems there now are, well, never mind,” Rastowich trailed
to a stop, scratched vigorously at an ear and took another sip before
continuing.

“What’s
in Larson is more valuable than weapons, or gold, or even medicine.”

Nakamura
squinted. The Colonel waited with a half-smile.

“Leprechauns?”
The Captain asked, deadpan.

“Knowledge,”
Rastowich said, smiling. “More in one spot than may exist anywhere else in
North America at this point.”

“It
can’t be computers. All but shielded ones were fried, if the Academy profs told
me the truth.”

“Not
computers, no,” Rastowich said. “As a culture we lost almost everything with
the Fall. We’d spent the preceding decades transferring everything to
electronic storage, and God crapped a handful of rocks on us and erased it.
Poof.”

“There
are still stored media, aren’t there?” Nakamura twirled a finger. “Those CCs or
whatever they are?”

“CDs.
And DVDs. There are,” Rastowich agreed with a humorless chuckle, “But they’re
beer coasters now. And we don’t have the only ones that would matter – the ones
they were archiving in DC. Still, you’d need a computer. We can’t even make a
player for the discs, and what few surviving computers we have are busy in deep
bunkers as is. We can’t spend time searching discs unless we know they’re worth
the time. No, as a culture we made a mistake. We got rid of paper and went to
new, efficient storage that was fast and perfect and utterly vulnerable. They
thought that information couldn’t be lost because it was stored repeatedly in
so many places, but it was all stored electronically, and when it went, it all
went.”

Rastowich
stood, took a step to where his battered satchel hung and dug a slim brown book
from it. He tossed it to Nakamura, who read the title and raised an eyebrow.

“
Basic
Arc Welding for Students
. Volume two. Sounds like a thrilling read, Sir.”

The
Colonel smiled.

“For
our engineers it was, I’m sure, as we crawled out of the smoking pile of crap
that had been the postindustrial world. You know we had to relearn the most
basic things - chemistry, blacksmithing, weaving just as an example. What books
survived are incredibly valuable.”

“There
are a lot of books around still, aren’t there, Sir? I mean, they’re not rare.
I’ve seen thousands.”

“Yes
and no,” Rastowich said, sitting down and sighing. “In the ruins of any major
city, you can scavenge as many copies of
The Shining
or
The DaVinci
Code
as you want. They’re interesting as historical exercises, but not
useful. Schools aren’t much help. In the mid-twentieth century they would have
been, with textbooks by the ton, but they went electronic as well. Little Jimmy
took a PDA to class.” Nakamura raised an eyebrow. “Sorry, it was a type of
little portable computer.

“Anyway,
even the Library of Congress and the major museums in old DC went with the
flow. Outside of some religious groups, most large libraries were transferred
to digital media, and many of the books were discarded or destroyed.”

“In
retrospect it seems idiotic,” Nakamura muttered, turning the pages in the book
he held. He looked up at the Colonel and handed the book back.

“Yes,”
Rastowich agreed. “Pride cometh and all that. But we got lucky. When the
Library of Congress was digitizing, a few people resisted destroying the
physical books. Some of the books, ones representative of their time, or rare,
or simply something that a librarian had a fondness for, were stored. In time
these stores exceeded the space available to any of the organizations, and they
petitioned Congress.” Rastowich shook his head. “From what I’ve read, they
barely managed to convince people that keeping anything was worthwhile, and
funding for a permanent storage facility wasn’t forthcoming, but they did
manage to get a stay of execution for a lot of the material.